


Open Cage

by loversandantiheroes



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-26
Updated: 2013-07-26
Packaged: 2017-12-21 09:57:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/898948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loversandantiheroes/pseuds/loversandantiheroes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A small scene between Rumpelstiltskin and Belle, set during Skin Deep as Belle prepares to leave to fetch him straw.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Open Cage

**Author's Note:**

> Author’s Note: This is my first foray into Rumbelle territory, and is really more about Rumpel than Rumbelle. This started as an attempt to tell what happened to Rose!Gaston, but it took a rather drastic turn to the angst and Gaston got left to the side for the time being. I do plan to return to him later. This falls back on some of the ideas I’ve established in my two Cursed!Storybrooke fics regarding how Time and Fate function. It’s no coincidence the main metaphors come back to wheels and tapestries.

_I’m creeping back to life_

_My nervous system all awry_

_I’m wearing the inside out_

_-_ Pink Floyd _, Wearing the Inside Out_

————

He listened for her steps as she walked to the great door, soft shoes for travel, the swish of her silver-green cloak on the marble floors.  The basket in her arms creaked.  Her eyes were on him, a palpable weight.  She called his name from the antechamber.  It bounced its way to him over stone walls and vaulted ceiling in a flurry of phantom whispers, a thousand voices calling to him.  

He shuddered.  Already she sounded like a ghost.

"Rumpelstiltskin!" she called again, louder.

 _Rumpelstiltskin_ , the walls cried back.

Magic was woven in the walls.  It was what he had used to build the place lifetimes before, still reeling in a fugue of grief and fury.  He had lost himself for nearly a year, building his walls brick by brick, inside and out.  One morning he had simply awoken on the ground, bindweed curling around his limbs and twining in his hair, earth trying to reclaim him.  His clothing hung off his body.  How long had he lain there?  Days?  Weeks?   _Months?_   Had he eaten at all since he had laid his first brick?  The gods only knew, and they were less likely to throw him favor now than when he was no more than the ward of spinsters.  

The shadow of his fortress had loomed over him, cold and dark, battlements like jagged, rotting teeth.  He could not recall the rites he had used to build it or what they had required.  It was perhaps better that way.  Some walls were streaked with a dirty maroon that would never wash off, others showing yellow-white that might have been ivory, but wasn’t.  A castle built of death.

The dead echoed the girl’s voice again, mocking her, mocking him, mocking life.

Rumpelstiltskin did not turn his head.  He sat as she had left him, hunched in the chair at the head of the feast table, hands limp, head straight, heart pounding.

His name on her lips.  He had never expected to hear something so sweet in this life again.  The care.  The worry.  Nothing he deserved.  And she deserved so much better.

Time was a funny thing.  Fate even more so.  Wise men had likened it to a river, flowing from mountain to sea, its course fixed.  The analogy was rubbish.  Time and Fate were interwoven, overlapping currents in a vast, unfathomable ocean, fixed points like islands.  Follow the right  _when_  at the right  _where_  and you would arrive at one of them.  The tapestry of Time and Fate was singed into his mind, but it was mutable, currents shifted, tides changed, islands drifted.  Milah had been an island for him.  And Bae.  Cora, too, though she had proved to him how tricky his Sight was, how much it left hidden, how much the tides would shift.

The Seer had taken his hands and in a brilliant flare of red and gold he had seen himself, a million versions of himself, living, dying, loving, losing.  Again and again and again.  He found his son a million times and lost him a million more.  In all the courses, all the threads, not once had he seen this girl.  The Sight had prepared him for everything but her and what she had stirred in him again.

Part of him, a true part of him that had slumbered in grief and shame for lifetimes was waking again.  As impossible as it seemed, he was falling in love with her, and it frightened him.  She was the wildcard, and if he could not See her, could not predict her, he could not protect her.  Or himself.

This, he told himself again as he had every moment since he had opened the door of her cage, was for the best.  For both of them.

"Go," he said.  He fixed his eyes ahead.  He could not look at her.  If he met her eyes now he would be lost.  He wanted her to stay, wanted to take her in his arms and beg her to never leave - not for their deal, but for  _him_  - but he knew he could not.

She faltered at the door, waiting for him to say more or trying to think of something to say herself, he did not know.  Hinges creaked, and the windows rattled as the door closed behind her.

Rumpelstiltskin closed his eyes.  "Goodbye, Belle."


End file.
